Consciousness, Cave Art, and Dreams
Marcel Kuijsten interviewed by Brendan Leahy, in Marcel Kuijsten (ed.), Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind (Julian Jaynes Society, 2022).
Summary: Marcel Kuijsten interviewed by Brendan Leahy on the third hypothesis of Julian Jaynes’s theory: dating the transition from bicameral mentality to consciousness. With disscussion of cave art and the transition from visitation to conscious dreams.
Excerpt: Brendan Leahy: Jaynes’s third hypothesis is dating the transition from bicameral mentality to consciousness to roughly 1500 to 1200 BCE in the cultures around the Mediterranean. Can you talk about some of the evidence that Jaynes provides with regard to the dating for this transition?
Marcel Kuijsten: Yes, there are a number of lines of evidence. Jaynes looked at the development of the words in ancient Greek that eventually came to mean “mind,” such as the word noos. And initially, each of these words referred either to physical processes like “vision” or “to see,” or they referred to parts of the body like the heart or the lungs. It was not until later that the meaning of these words evolved to mean things like “conscious mind.” And so the thinking is that if the ancient Greeks did not have words for consciousness, they likely did not have the experience of consciousness. …